“And would you rather die, than obey your father?”
“Siddhartha has always obeyed his father.”
“So will you abandon your plan?”
“Siddhartha will do what his father will tell him to do.”
The first light of day shone into the room. The Brahmin saw that Siddhartha was trembling softly in his knees. In Siddhartha’s face he saw no trembling, his eyes were fixed on a distant spot. Then his father realized that even now Siddhartha no longer dwelt with him in his home, that he had already left him.
The Father touched Siddhartha’s shoulder.
“You will,” he spoke, “go into the forest and be a Samana. When you’ll have found blissfulness in the forest, then come back and teach me to be blissful. If you’ll find disappointment, then return and let us once again make offerings to the gods together. Go now and kiss your mother, tell her where Siddhartha: An Open-Source Text
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you are going. But for me it is time to go to the river and to perform the first ablution.”
From the reading. . .
“It had to be found, the pristine source in one’s own self, it had to be possessed! Everything else was searching, was a detour, was getting lost.”
He took his hand from the shoulder of his son and went outside. Siddhartha wavered to the side, as he tried to walk. He put his limbs back under control, bowed to his father, and went to his mother to do as his father had said.
As he slowly left on stiff legs in the first light of day the still quiet town, a shadow rose near the last hut, who had crouched there, and joined the pilgrim—Govinda.
“You have come,” said Siddhartha and smiled.
“I have come,” said Govinda.
Banyan Tree
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Topics Worth Investigating
1. What does it mean to have the goal to recognize Atman (the universal soul or inner essence present in each individual)? Siddhartha wonders,
". . . where else but in one’s own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself. . . where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part?" Investigate the distinctions among Atman, Self, self, and ego.
2. Morris Berman writes
Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of “individuation,” the process whereby a person discovers and evolves his Self, as opposed to his ego. The ego is a persona, a mask created and demanded by everyday social interaction, and, as such, it constitutes the center of our conscious life, our understanding of ourselves through the eyes of others. The Self, on the other hand, is our true center, our awareness of ourselves without outside interference, and it is developed by bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds into harmony.1
Are the subconscious or unconscious parts of our mind the “innermost self”? Or are the habits which make up our character or our essence, the
“innermost self”? What do you think is this "innermost self"?
3. Since Siddhartha seemed to have everything going for him, why is he so discontent? Is he simply seeking the independence of adulthood? Would it be for Siddhartha, as Emerson writes, “Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of the will”?2 Clarify why Emerson’s description of discontent would be an inappropriate characterization of Siddhartha’s state of mind.
4. What do you suspect are the psychological effects of referring to ourselves in the “third person”? In your answer, take account of the following remark in an article by a Princeton astrophysicist and a Stanford psychologist:
“The ‘hard problem’ is not the ‘third-person’ problem of providing a scien-tific account for how a physical system, such as a human brain, can come to carry out the information processing necessary for intelligent behavior.
The reason that this is not the ‘hard problem’ is that no physical limitation has so far been identified concerning what a sufficiently complex physical 1.
Morris Berman. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.
2.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Self-Reliance” in Essays: First Series. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1942.
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system might be capable of . . . The ‘hard problem’ is, instead, the ‘first-person’ problem of understanding how the subjective quality of experience (including, the seemingly nonphysical ’qualia’ of pains, colors, odors, etc. ) can be explained or understood as arising from any physical system as described in the objective terms of present day physics. . . ”3
In writing, the third person point of view expresses a more objective se-lection of the thoughts and feelings of different characters as observed from an outside, impersonal perspective. The first person viewpoint con-fines understanding to the thoughts and feelings of the writer and what the writer knows from other sources. How could our understanding of ourselves differ by constantly referring to ourselves in the third person in our thoughts and speech?
Finally, is the third person perspective a denial of Rainer Marie Rilke’s well known stance quoted below?
And I certainly should have known that this third person who appears in every life and literature, this ghost of a third person who never existed, has no significance and must be denied. He is one of the pretexts of nature who is always intent on diverting men’s attention from her deepest mysteries.4
Discuss whether personal truth about ourselves is lost through a third-person (or objective) point of view. Specifically, try to state as clearly as possible what is lost.
3.
Piet Hut and Roger N. Shepard. “Turning ‘The Hard Problem’ Upside Down and Side-ways,” “Journal of Consciousness Studies”. (1996) 3, No.4, 313-329.
4.
Rainer Marie Rilke. The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge in Walter Kaufmann. Existen-tialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956. 114-5.
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